Cross-Court Cognition, Wimbledon Serves Up Ever-Deeper Data Play On IBM

New balls please? Yes, but only if they come with cognitive data analytics.

IBM

Whether you like the sport of tennis or not, it’s hard to ignore the fact that summer is Wimbledon season. The UK capital city of London is known for grand buildings, warm beer and its native inhabitant’s sometimes misunderstood abruptness of attitude (spoiler alert: Londoners are actually warm and lovely people). London is also known for Wimbledon – a quiet and leafy suburb that is quiet and unassuming for 50 weeks of the year until the world’s sporting glitterati join royals and celebrities to see two players bash a rubber ball over a net at each other for up to five hours at a stretch.

For almost 30-years now IBM has been providing Wimbledon with technology. What started off as stopwatches and electronic net ‘beep’ systems eventually progressed to camera-enabled smart line judges (leverage of the Hawkeye system) and finally onward into the use of big data analytics to digitize player behavior and tactics. Today, it’s all about personalizing the viewing experience.

According to IBM, “Sports and entertainment companies compete on compelling content, but there is now more content created every day than any of us can consume. With more channels, more devices and more video content, consumers can now access personalized content anywhere, anytime. That is why personalizing the fan experience is a top priority for so many telecom, media and entertainment companies.”

For the fans, not just the coaches

Every year IBM attempts to bring new layers of technology to bear upon the Wimbledon championships. Recent augmentations have seen IBM provide information designed to inform not just tennis coaches and players, but also for fans who want to know what it will take to win in a game where margins for winning and losing are becoming increasingly exacting.

The Slamtracker ‘Cognitive Keys to the Match’ feature was built on IBM's predictive analytics technology (SPSS). This mines over eight years of Grand Slam Tennis data (~41 million data points) to determine patterns and styles for players when they win. Players and fans alike got an insight into what comparable players with comparable styles must do tactically if they are to win a match.

At the All England Club (Wimbledon’s official name) itself, IBM operates a bunker filled full of data scientists whose job it is to number crunch their way through every digitally captured move, play, ball bounce and judging line call throughout each match. Interesting, these guys and girls are mainly tennis pros in the first instance. As detailed previously on Forbes, this is because it’s easier to teach a tennis pro data analytics than it is to teach a data analyst the specific mechanics of professional tennis.

First to (news) market

What is perhaps interesting here is that although Wimbledon will welcome many members of the international press community through its gates, it is the organization itself that now seeks to be ‘first to market’ with news and analysis of the tournament on the back of its IBM data fabric. Obviously IBM has spent a large part its post-millennial focus on delivering exactly the kind of real-time analytics that this level of match analysis requires.

In IBM’s own words, “The use of a new competitive margin metrics will help the Wimbledon editorial team tell the stories of the matches in new ways as it happens to deliver added insight to fans, creating not just context, but connection.”

The now updated IBM SlamTracker with Cognitive Keys to the Match is a cross platform application (also for mobile) with real-time scores, stats and insights for all matches in progress. The software uses IBM Watson APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to refine and update the player style based on match data.

Real-time data will be integrated from multiple sources including:

Courtside statisticians,

Chair umpires,

Radar guns,

Ball position,

Player location and

Twitter for social sentiment.

Also new to the table (sorry, the court side) is a new Watson-enabled software ‘bot’ called Ask Fred designed to bring a new level of Artificial Intelligence (AI) forward. This virtual guide will be able to answer a variety of interactive questions from fans visiting the event. This mobile app features a Natural Language Interface (NLI) and an interactive map of the venue. Readers will note that not all Londoners are in fact called Fred.

“At the heart of Wimbledon’s technology are IBM’s cognitive solutions delivering the best insights and analysis possible to encourage great fan engagement,” said Sam Seddon, Wimbledon client & programme executive, IBM. “Cognitive computing is the next revolution in sports technology and working with us, Wimbledon is exposed to the foremost frontier of what technology can do, as we work together to achieve the best possible outcome for the brand and the event. Cognitive is now pervasive from driving the fan experience, to providing efficiency for digital editors to IT operations.”

Video highlights, bases on crowd cheers

Also new in 2017 are automated video highlights (generated using IBM Watson technology) and the use of immersive mixed reality. With matches on 18 courts simultaneously and an average of 3 matches per court per day, video from the matches can quickly add up to thousands of hours of footage which could take hours to pull together.

IBM explains that the system developed by IBM (Research & iX) will auto-curate highlights based on crowd noise, players movements and match data to help simplify the highlight video production process and focus on key moments in the match. This allows the Wimbledon video production team to scale and accelerate the video production process for highlight packages.

Game, set and match?

As digital as tennis (and indeed all sport) has become, it does appear (to a casual tennis fan and data/programming specialist at least) that the sport itself has not been ‘ruined’ by over-engineering and over-digitization. Players still need to work hard and practice, practice, practice if they want to stand any chance of winning Wimbledon.

Do most players go out onto court and think about the IT in the bunker? Do they say to themselves, “Well, I’m not sure if I can beat Roger Federer or Andy Murray this year, but thankfully we have IBM Watson analytics powered by IBM’s secure cloud layer running in the background for real time analytics insight.” Well, almost certainly not.

What we do have though is a clear example of how IBM is using real-time data analytics driven by the Watson brand to change the way we can consume a live event. The monitored crowds cheers directing TV coverage and highlights being arguably the best example.

In the future we may be able to argue that better fan experiences leads to more enthused fans, which leads to more amateur dreamers being driven to play better... and so, consequently, tennis (or indeed any game) becoming an ever more powerfully developed sporting spectacle. Or we could just say that it’ll be two players whacking a rubber ball over a net, but doing it really awfully well to the cheers of a connected interactive audience.

Wimbledon is more than that, even before the technology.

IBM Watson is being deployed across an increasing playing surface at the Wimbledon Championships in the UK.